Top 673 Quotes & Sayings by Sylvia Plath - Page 2

There is something suspect, especially in America, about people who don't have ten-year plans for a career or at least a regular job.

The next five months are grim ones. I always feel sorry to have the summertime change, with the dark evenings closing in mid-afternoon, and will try to lay in some physical comforts these months - the best insurance against gloominess for me.

I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends.

I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham.

Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want you, need you: the belief in you and love and mankind.

I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here 'freelance' and perhaps shall join the Labour Club, as I really want to become informed on politics, and it seems to have an excellent program. I am definitely not a Conservative, and the Liberals are too vague and close to the latter.

What I want back is what I was.

It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.

Perfection is terrible; it cannot have children.

Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.

I remember that as I was writing a poem on 'Snow' when I was eight, I said aloud, 'I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now when I am little, because when I grow up, I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.'

I've begun to think like a Jew, to feel like a Jew.

Didn't you know I'm going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world? Well, don't feel badly, I didn't either!

We fitted, amusingly enough, into none of the form categories of 'The Young American Couple'... security to us is in ourselves, and no job, not even money, can give us what we have to develop: faith in our work and hard, hard work, which is Spartan in many ways.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us since my father died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money because he didn't trust life insurance salesmen.

My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.

I saw the first of the 7-mile-long column appear - red and orange and green banners, 'Ban the Bomb!' etc., shining and swaying slowly. Absolute silence. I found myself weeping to see the tan, dusty marchers, knapsacks on their backs - Quakers and Catholics, Africans and whites, Algerians and French - 40 percent were London housewives.

In London the day after Christmas (Boxing Day), it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five years, I had been tactfully asking, 'Do you ever have snow at all?' as I steeled myself to the six months of wet, tepid gray that make up an English winter. 'Ooo, I do remember snow,' was the usual reply, 'when I were a lad.'

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.

I think the sea swallowed dozens of tea sets - tossed in abandon off liners or consigned to the tide by jilted brides. I collected a shiver of china bits, with borders of larkspur and birds or braids of daisies. No two patterns ever matched.

Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?

I woke to the sound of rain.

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever.

Opinions are like orgasms...mine matters most and I really don't care if you have one.

I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

I love life. But it is hard and I have so much, so very much to learn.

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

After all, we are nothing more or less than we choose to reveal.

Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.

There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds.

It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me.

I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

Sometimes I feel like I'm not solid. I'm hollow. There's nothing behind my eyes. I'm a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.

I think I made you up inside my head.

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

Love life day by day, color by color, touch by touch.

Hour by hour, day by day, life becomes possible.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

Your room is not your prison. You are.

It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted & spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly-managed past.

No day is safe from news of you.